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Mesmerizing GIFs Show Cities Passing From Day to Night

The GIFs from Time In Motion are made from the same source material as Qi Wei's previous project, Time Is a Dimension.

Each vertex and frame in the images represents a single moment in time at the same location, taken between a four-hour period around sunset.

Most of the photos in the series were taken in the photographer's home country in Singapore.

Different GIFs in Time In Motion use the format in different ways -- in some, the frames flicker chronologically, in others the times represented shift around to create unique effects.

GIF-ing the original images took a total of four months to complete.

Whereas Time Is a Dimension allowed for the contemplation of each individual shard, Time In Motion is more about the overall effect of seeing the different moments move against one another.

Fong Qi Wei likes to use these images as a jumping off point for asking questions about how we perceive time itself.

It's rare that we see a favorite photo project upgraded to GIF status, and we're excited to see that's exactly what Fong Qi Wei has done with his series Time Is a Dimension.

While the original images in that series contained implicit movement by virtue of their time-anchored shards, the GIF animation makes them much more dynamic. The new series is called, appropriately, Time in Motion.

“For me, Time in Motion adds more questions about what time is, compared to Time Is a Dimension,” says Qi Wei. “Is this how simultaneous instances of time can be perceived coherently? Are the 'time tunnel' GIFs showing light being slowed down? Who knew time could be so trippy?”

Using the same source material as the first series, the GIFs’ various shards flicker between different times of day, creating ripples of time that weave throughout the images. The added element of time can be played with in various ways to achieve different effects. For example, certain images like Chinatown Sunset and Glassy Sunset (slides 1 and 2) follow a chronological sequence, while Tanah Lot Sunset (slide 4) uses non-chronological groupings of time that phase in and out with one another.

“The geometric slices and shapes introduce an additional layered structure on top of the scene which I can control,” says Qi Wei.

The idea for Time In Motion came to Qi Wei while working on its predecessor, and has taken about four months to put together. For the original series, Qi Wei shot at the same location for between two to four hours, usually at sunset to catch the most dynamic and glorious lighting. The challenge then was to slice up an image in an interesting way, then to find ways of using the best moments in a given shard and arrange them into a coherent overall image. In this case, the same balance was necessary, but has to be sustained across each frame.

One thing lost in the conversion is time for inspection and contemplation. The images now generally pass by far too quickly to be discerned, leaving the overall effect to be taken in. Ultimately, Qi Wei is as interested in notions of time raised by these pictures as he is in the aesthetics of the images themselves.

Qi Wei’s website encourages viewers to "think about it" when perusing his work, whether or not any answers are there to be found is up to viewers. In any case, it does add another dimension of engagement to the images themselves, and it’s clear that Qi Wei is excited to ask as he is to be answered.

“I'm no physicist,” he says, “but I think it's cool that nature, sunsets and sunrises can still surprise us now and then.”